In today's market, there is an increasing focus to install massively scalable data centers (MSDC) and configure them through automated orchestration. A controller may need to configure huge numbers of switches in an MSDC. In such a case, it could dump the entire configuration onto a switch and let the switch respond back when the entire configuration is accepted. However, present switch operating systems don't know if a given/proposed configuration or interface event can be successfully accepted by the hardware on the switch. This is even more the case in a virtual Port-channel (“vPC”) scenario where a configuration must be accepted as a success only when it goes successfully into hardware in both vPC peer switches.
Another problem is unpredictable bursts of system load. This can happen because of any system level trigger, i.e., reload of this switch or peers needing to be reloaded, or vPC peer-link shut/no shut. These may cause a number of physical/logical interfaces to flap. A number of interfaces generating concurrent resource-consuming events like LINK_UP too can cause unusual system load due to bringing up a number of interfaces in a short span of time.